Sacred Spaces: #1 Best-Seller & Recipient of the Books for Peace International Award

The book that put Olivia Ramirez Smith on the international wellness-author map was not solely hers.

Sacred Spaces: Subtle Shifts for Mind, Body, and Home Transformation is a collaboration. The project was led by author and editor Colleen Avis. It brings together voices of women writers from around the globe, each contributing the practical wisdom they have learned about how small, intentional changes shift a woman’s relationship to her body, her mind, and the spaces she lives in. Olivia Ramirez Smith is one of those contributors.

The book reached number one bestseller status after release. The international wellness community took notice. So did the Books for Peace International Award committee, which named Sacred Spaces among the year’s recipients, a recognition reserved for works that contribute meaningfully to peace, healing, and human connection.

The win mattered for more than the award itself. Books for Peace is not a wellness category. It is a global humanitarian recognition. Sacred Spaces earned it because the contributors, together, made the case that internal peace, the kind a woman builds inside her own body, mind, and home, is the foundation that any larger peace stands on.

That argument is the spine of the book.

Sacred Spaces does not ask its readers to overhaul their lives. It does the opposite. It asks them to make small shifts. In how they breathe. In how they organize a corner of a room. In how they end the day. In how they speak to themselves. Each shift is modest. Each shift, over time, changes the larger system.

Olivia Ramirez Smith’s contribution to the book reflects her central work. As a Master Neurolinguistic Practitioner (NLP) and a certified Mental and Emotional Release (MER) specialist, she writes about the small changes a woman can make at the level beneath conscious thought, the level where most lasting change actually happens. Her chapter draws on the same body of practice that informs her bestselling book The Mother Earth Effect, her work on The Earthing Movie, and her retreats at Sole Rooted in Joshua Tree.

The collaboration model is part of what made Sacred Spaces work. Colleen Avis assembled a group of contributors whose voices reinforced rather than competed with each other. Each woman wrote within her own area of expertise. The book’s structure is choral. The reader does not get a single author’s perspective. The reader gets a chorus.

That structure is unusual for a wellness number one bestseller. Most chart toppers in the category are single-author. Sacred Spaces succeeded by going the other way. It treated wellness wisdom as something that does not belong to one person, and the readers responded.

For Olivia Ramirez Smith, the book was a marker. Sacred Spaces is her first number one bestseller. It came before The Mother Earth Effect, the bestselling book she would later write under her own name. The order matters. Sacred Spaces taught her what an international wellness audience would respond to. It introduced her to readers in countries she had not yet reached. It put her, alongside Colleen Avis and the other contributors, in the conversation about how women heal at scale.

The Books for Peace International Award added one more layer. It moved her work out of the wellness category and into a wider humanitarian conversation. That recognition does not happen to most authors at any career stage. It happened to Olivia Ramirez Smith and the other Sacred Spaces contributors because the underlying argument was strong enough to travel.

The book is still in print. Still finding readers. Still introducing women, one at a time, to the idea that subtle shifts in the right places change everything they touch. That, in Colleen Avis’s framing and in Olivia Ramirez Smith’s, is what real peace work looks like.